Tag: ethnographic research

So maybe I use my wife’s make-up removing face wipes every night. It is much more convenient than having to wash my face and they work better anyways. So aside from the fact that I use a feminine product to clean my face, there is an important lesson to be learned here: ethnographic research.

What you say is ethnographic research? Wikipedia defines ethnography as, “In the biological sciences, this type of study might be called a field study or a case report…” Basically, it means watching your members, or customers, use your product and making determinations about ways to make it better. I’ve read reports of a large LCD TV manufacturer follow customers home and watch them try to unpack their unwieldy and awkward widescreen LCD or plasma TV’s. The result? Rather than taking a TV out of the box, like you do with nearly every other product, you actually take the box off of the TV. The TV remains sitting on the bottom part of the box and the end user simply pulls the upper part of the box off. That proved to be much simpler than trying to lift an 80 pound TV out of a box at waist level.

Back to my face wipes. They are some variety of alcohol-based wipe so there is a small amount of cleansing fluid in the packaging. But over the course of time, all of the fluid settles to the bottom of the package and the wipes at the top of the package, the ones you actually use, lose some of their moisture. The result is a product that doesn’t work as good as it should. The solution is simple, I turn the package upside-down every few days to let the fluid seep back down and remoisten the wipes at the top. Simple solution for the end user, but how many people actually do that vs how many switch to another brand?

What kind of gyrations do your members go through to get an envelope out of an ATM that only somebody sitting in a lawn chair can reach? Have you ever watched any of your members try to log in with your MFA product or fill out a deposit slip? And I don’t mean casually observe. I mean time them. Watch how long it takes someone to find that check box that I want to “deposit” funds or how long it takes them to read the statement, “I’m sorry, you are attempting to access your account from an un-authorized computer…” Sometimes the best thing you can do for your brand and your members’ experience is to simply sit back and watch. You might be amazed at what you’ll find out.